War Movies

The Vietnam Oscars

Three years after the fall of Saigon, Hollywood finally dealt with Vietnam. And how. Produced by maverick talents amid creative chaos, Coming Home and The Deer Hunter split the industry, the critics, and the 1979 Academy Awards.

Throughout the duration of the bloody, wasteful, and fratricidal Vietnam War—roughly, say, from the commitment of the first American military advisers, in 1961, to the war’s end, in 1975—the Hollywood studios maintained a discreet silence, save for a few exceptions, such as John Wayne’s jingoist picture, The Green Berets, released in 1968. This was a deeply unpopular war, and conventional studio wisdom held that Americans saw enough of it on the six-o’clock news. But the dam finally broke in 1978, when the studios released two high-profile features, both replete with Hollywood’s best and brightest, Coming Home and The Deer Hunter.

Even though three years had passed since the panicky evacuation of U.S. personnel and some South Vietnamese friends from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, the two pictures, which seemed to come down on opposite sides of the conflict, brought the war home with a vengeance, reopening old wounds and inflaming passions long thought spent. As Bruce Gilbert, associate producer of Coming Home, puts it, “The war may have been over, but the war over the interpretation of the war was just beginning.” Both movies vacuumed up Oscar nominations—The Deer Hunter nine, Coming Home eight—setting the stage for the war to be refought at, of all places, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, in Los Angeles. It was a battle that would echo the real one in its bitterness.

“That Movie Will Never Be Made”

Jane Fonda and Jon Voight in Coming Home.From United Artists/Photofest.

Coming Home was born of a what-if “game” played in 1972 by Jane Fonda and her friend and fellow activist Gilbert. Tarred by the right with the sobriquet “Hanoi Jane” for a notorious photograph, widely circulated, where she was seen sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, Fonda was having career troubles. She had been graylisted, her agent was having difficulty getting roles for her, and she was even thinking about giving up acting. Her conversations with Gilbert would go, “If we could make any film in the world, what would it be?” Of course, the answer always came back, “A film about the Vietnam War.” But that only raised more questions: What kind of film about Vietnam? A war film? With combat? That didn’t seem right. Like most of the activists in the peace movement, they venerated the Vietnamese, their history and culture, but with the war still going on they obviously couldn’t shoot in Vietnam, and they didn’t want to phony up their picture by having, say, Filipinos play Vietnamese, which, as Gilbert puts it, “was sort of like white guys playing Indians.” That meant a story about the home front.

“Around January 1973, I was speaking at an anti-war rally with Ron Kovic,” recalls Fonda. Kovic had been a hard-charging Marine serving his second tour of duty in Vietnam when he was wounded and paralyzed; he then turned against the war and wrote the memoir Born on the Fourth of July. Fonda continues: “From his wheelchair, Ron said something that stuck with me: ‘I may have lost my body, but I’ve gained my mind.’ I thought, Wouldn’t that be an interesting hook for a movie?”

She and Gilbert decided to focus their story on disabled G.I.’s, in the tradition of post–World War II pictures such as The Best Years of Our Lives and The Men. Needing a part for Fonda, they came up with the idea of a woman torn between two men: her husband, an officer, and a paraplegic enlisted man.

Fonda felt that an unconventional, politicized love story also presented an opportunity, in her words, to “talk about what really makes a man. Is he the gung-ho guy who’s going over there to get the gooks and come back and fuck your brains out, or is he the guy who’s more sensitive and knows how to use other parts of himself, like his hands and his mouth?” (Kovic had told Fonda his injuries “really helped my sex life.”)

Gilbert, who had never written a script before, collaborated on the screenplay with Nancy Dowd, an acquaintance of Fonda’s and a recent film-school graduate. The script was called Buffalo Ghost. It ended up on a shelf.

But good ideas die hard, and eventually Fonda and Gilbert decided that what the project really needed was an actual writer. They turned to Waldo Salt, whom Fonda knew slightly. Salt was an old lefty who had been blacklisted and was best known for his Oscar-winning script for Midnight Cowboy, released in 1969. But Fonda’s agent, Mike Medavoy, whom she shared with Salt, implored her not to do it, and ridiculed the idea of a Vietnam-themed movie. According to Gilbert, Medavoy told him, “Kid, that movie will never be made. You’ve got a paralyzed Vietnam veteran, and you’ve got a love scene no one wants to see. It is the worst, least-commercial idea I have ever heard of.” Says Medavoy today, “It was a dangerous project to do. And theater owners were saying they wouldn’t play Jane’s pictures, especially in the South.” Salt did not much like the script, either, but he was dying to tackle the Vietnam War. He would begin working on it pro bono, he said, only if he could start from scratch and do his own research with disabled vets. Salt brought in director John Schlesinger and producer Jerome Hellman, with whom he had made Midnight Cowboy.

Even with that pedigree, none of the studios bit on Coming Home until Hellman took Salt’s treatment to United Artists, where he had made Midnight Cowboy and had a close relationship with the company’s head, Arthur Krim. Ironically, U.A.’s head of production was now Medavoy, who had changed his mind about the picture. Hellman presented Krim with a bare-bones $5 million budget, and Krim agreed to finance the film.

But when Hellman showed Salt’s treatment to Schlesinger, the director balked. He said, “Look, I can’t talk to these guys. I don’t know about pissbags. The last thing they need is a baroque British faggot” making the movie. Suddenly, Hellman needed a new director. He had once written Hal Ashby a fan letter after seeing The Last Detail, Ashby’s 1973 film, with Jack Nicholson. Ashby was a former editor who looked and dressed like a hippie, with a beard, sandals, and long blond—now white—hair falling down either side of his face. Hellman had heard all the Ashby stories. He knew he was a dedicated pothead—an avocation that had devolved into a nasty coke habit. Ashby was paranoid and an avoider, would disappear when faced with unpleasantness. “I don’t think Hal liked people very much,” says Fonda. “That’s why he was stoned all the time.” But Hellman also knew that Ashby had directed a handful of the finest films of the 1970s: not only The Last Detail, but Harold and Maude, Shampoo, and Bound for Glory as well. That was enough for the producer.

It so happened that Ashby lived a few houses away from Hellman in the Malibu Colony. In those days, you could knock on someone’s door and hand him a script without having to brave a phalanx of agents, managers, and lawyers. Ashby read the script and said yes. Ashby refused, however, to defer his usual fee, the way the other principals had, and insisted on $400,000 up front, which he got. “Hal, the guy who didn’t care about money, was now gonna be the highest-paid guy on the movie,” says Hellman. “So, what else is new?”

While Salt interviewed more disabled vets, Ashby and Hellman began to scare up a cast to play opposite Fonda. They wanted a blond, blue-eyed straight-arrow type to play Fonda’s officer husband—someone like Jon Voight, who was desperate to get onto the movie. He too had felt the pull of the anti-war movement in the 60s, and was attracted by the politics of the picture. But Fonda couldn’t see him in the part. According to Hellman, she said, “He’s too wimpy—he’s not manly enough. I see someone much more physical. But if you believe that he’s the guy, I’ll support you.” Voight got the role and was ecstatic, even though what he really wanted was the paraplegic part—Luke Martin. And despite his enthusiasm for the spirit of the project, Voight didn’t much like the script. He recalls, “My response was: This is not really a film yet—it’s a polemic.” But he kept his mouth shut. “If you go to a meeting and say, ‘Well, I think it’s terrific, but I think you have to change all of this,’ that won’t get you the job.”

The filmmakers thought that the role of the paralyzed enlisted man called for a working-class or ethnic actor like Jack Nicholson or Al Pacino. Both declined. Medavoy suggested Sly Stallone, whose Rocky U.A. was producing. “We were in shock,” recalls Hellman. “We said to ourselves, ‘We will not make the film with Sylvester Stallone. We’ll take it elsewhere.’ But Stallone didn’t like the script. Why? There were too many people in it! ‘I like a movie where there’s only one guy.’ ” Medavoy, who tells a slightly different story, says he showed 20 minutes of Rocky to Ashby, who nixed Stallone.

Meanwhile, Voight kept bird-dogging Ashby about playing Luke. “I was walking with Hal at one point, and I said, ‘You know, Hal, I’m right for this film, because this guy has to be a lover, and I’m a lover.’ What I really meant, I suppose, was that it had to be a love story. Otherwise, the film wouldn’t work. It couldn’t be a political diatribe.” According to Hellman, he and Ashby had a long talk where they discussed their frustration at being “surrounded by assholes, executives we couldn’t trust” at U.A. They decided to follow their instincts. “So we said, ‘O.K., let’s cast Jon Voight in the lead.’ ” Hellman says Medavoy objected, screaming, “You’re ruining the picture!” But Medavoy predicted that Krim would sign off on the choice, and Krim did.

That left Voight’s former role open. One actor under consideration was Bruce Dern, who also lived in Malibu, a few doors down from Hellman and Ashby. Dern had come up through the Hollywood ranks with Nicholson in the mid-60s, but had had a few tough breaks and never made it to the top. He was bitter, always thought that Nicholson had had the career he should have had. He says, “I wasn’t first on anybody’s list. When I got a script, it was only if 10 or 12 guys passed on it, and they cut the budget in half, and then they’d make it with a Dern.” Thanks to his odd combination of jittery energy and menacing nonchalance, he’d been typecast as a psycho in films such as The Cowboys and Black Sunday. “Jane Fonda was a movie star,” he says. “I was just Bruce Dern, a fucking wacko.” Still, Ashby hired him.

“I Hope It Works”

The start date was only seven weeks away, but Salt, a notoriously slow writer who had consumed more than his share of alcohol and drugs over the years, had delivered only 36 pages of a shooting script. Ashby was getting panicky. There was a tense meeting on Thanksgiving weekend in 1976. Salt, 62, looked tired and frail. He was used to the courtly Schlesinger, but Ashby was another story. The director had that vaporous, stoner way of speaking, so it was hard to determine exactly what he was saying. But, according to Gilbert, Salt did know that Ashby wanted pages, and said what he always said in these circumstances: “Like real estate is location, location, location? With movies it’s story, story, story. Conceptualizing is hard; the writing is easy. So, get off my back.” Ashby retorted, “If the writing is so fucking easy, where are the fucking pages? We go into rehearsals in seven weeks!” Later that day, Hellman’s doctor, whom he shared with Salt, called to say that the writer had suffered a heart attack.

For a millisecond, Hellman considered pushing the picture back. But he knew that that was a recipe for disaster. “I always felt Medavoy in the background was like a dark presence—the Darth Vader of the project,” he says. “We had a guy who had hated the stuff from the start, and thought Voight was a terrible idea. You go into a situation like that and you’ve got to be a fucking idiot to delay. You’re giving them an opportunity to stop you.” It was full speed ahead.

Ashby hired Robert C. Jones, his regular film editor and an aspiring writer, to finish Salt’s script. It was an unorthodox choice, to say the least, throwing an inexperienced writer into the deep end of the pool only a few weeks from production. This was especially true in that Ashby, in typical fashion, was unwilling or unable to communicate any particular vision. “Hal just gave me the script and said, ‘Do what you want to,’ ” Jones remembers. “The script was overlong, disconnected, and unfocused. I did the best I could.”

As the start date approached, and passed, the script became a group project, with everyone contributing pages: Voight, Dern, Ashby, Hellman, Gilbert. Recalls Hellman, “Sometimes we would all show up for work with our own versions of the scene. We’d put them under the door of Hal’s trailer, and then he’d hack them all up and paste them all together, and the actors would improvise. The last day of filming, in Hong Kong, we were still working on the script.”

In a 1978 interview, Ashby, who died in 1988 of pancreatic cancer, recalled that Fonda had asked him during pre-production, “Have you ever started a film knowing no more about what we’re going to do than this?”

“No.”

“I hope it works.”

“So do I.”

An Italian Garry Shandling

Robert De Niro in a scene from The Deer Hunter.From the Kobal Collection.

In 1968, EMI, then the most successful record company in the world, went into the movie business. The new company was called EMI Films, run by producers Barry Spikings and Michael Deeley. Spikings had bought a script called The Man Who Came to Play, about people who go to Las Vegas to play Russian roulette. He was always looking for talented filmmakers, and set up a meeting with Michael Cimino after seeing Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, the director’s first film, starring Clint Eastwood, and released in 1974. Spikings didn’t much like The Man Who Came to Play, but hadn’t been able to get it out of his mind. He talked it over with Cimino, who, according to Spikings, said, “You know why you’re obsessed with it? It’s because the Russian roulette is a metaphor for what America was doing with its young people, sending them to a war in a foreign place, when there was no justification for it. I know something about Vietnam, and I’ve always wanted to do a movie about it. Are you up for it?” Spikings replied, “Sure.” That was the beginning of The Deer Hunter.

There’s always been a bit of a mystery surrounding this picture, squabbles over who wrote what, where the material came from, what Cimino really knew about Vietnam and the military, the extent to which the actors improvised the dialogue, and what the film’s ultimate point of view on the war was. Despite rapturous reviews heralding Cimino as the Second Coming, his subsequent work—Heaven’s Gate cultists notwithstanding—never came close to fulfilling the promise of The Deer Hunter, if promise it was.

In 1976, Cimino was 24 or 37, depending on whom you believe, Cimino or public records. He was small and chubby, with long curly hair. He looked a bit like an Italian Garry Shandling and carried all the baggage of a short man. “When I first met Michael he was making commercials and came to see me one day in a gigantic, perfectly manicured Rolls-Royce,” recalls Deric Washburn, who co-wrote Silent Running, a 1972 science-fiction picture, with Cimino and Steven Bochco.

Cimino told Spikings that he wanted to work again with Washburn, who was living in New York, writing for the theater—an innocent, Washburn says, as far as the movie business was concerned. The Deer Hunter would be his third script. As Washburn tells it, he and Cimino spent three days together in L.A. at the Sunset Marquis, hammering out the plot. The script eventually went through several drafts, evolving into a story with three distinct acts: The first establishes the main characters, five steel-mill workers and a bartender, all of Eastern European extraction, living in Clairton, a small town in Pennsylvania coal country. They work, they get sloppy drunk, they hunt deer, and eventually three of them go to war. The centerpiece of the first act is a lengthy Russian Orthodox wedding in which one of the future G.I.s, Steven, gets married to his pregnant girlfriend. Cut to Vietnam, where all three friends are captured, are forced to play Russian roulette by their North Vietnamese Army (N.V.A.) tormentors, and, after considerable violence, escape. In the third part, Michael, the main character, is back home in Clairton, for better or for worse—mostly worse—but returns to Vietnam to retrieve his buddy Nick, now a near zombie who robotically plays Russian roulette in sleazy clubs for the entertainment of gamblers who bet on the outcome; it’s The Man Who Came to Play set in Saigon instead of Las Vegas. And finally, for a coda, the film returns to Clairton, where the survivors, including Steven, now legless, gather in a bar to sing a doleful version of “God Bless America”—the meaning of which would become a subject of heated debate when the film was released.

Washburn didn’t interview any vets to write The Deer Hunter, didn’t do any research. (He had grown up in a middle-class family in Pittsburgh and spent six months in the army.) “I had a month, that was it,” he explains. “The clock was ticking. Write the fucking script! But all I had to do was watch TV. Those combat cameramen in Vietnam were out there in the field with the guys. I mean, they had stuff that you wouldn’t dream of seeing about Iraq.”

When Washburn was finished, he says, Cimino and Joann Carelli, an associate producer on The Deer Hunter who would go on to produce two more of Cimino’s films, took him to dinner at a cheap restaurant off the Sunset Strip. He recalls, “We finished, and Joann looks at me across the table, and she says, ‘Well, Deric, it’s fuck-off time.’ I was fired. It was a classic case: you get a dummy, get him to write the goddamn thing, tell him to go fuck himself, put your name on the thing, and he’ll go away. I was so tired, I didn’t care. I’d been working 20 hours a day for a month. I got on the plane the next day, and I went back to Manhattan and my carpenter job.”

Cimino, who has not directed a feature since 1996, and who has been the focus of gossip concerning his alleged desire to change his gender, could not be reached for comment. (His representatives said he was in China scouting locations for a new film.) But in an undated video interview he said of Washburn’s script, “I could not believe what I read. It was written by somebody who was mentally deranged.… He was totally stoned on scotch, out of his frigging mind. He started crying and screaming and yelling, ‘I can’t take the pressure! I can’t take the pressure!’ He was like a big baby.” Cimino claims he then wrote the script himself, an account that Carelli seconds. Be that as it may, Washburn would eventually receive sole credit for the screenplay and a co-credit for the film’s story after a Writers Guild arbitration. (He says of Cimino’s comments, “It’s all nonsense. It’s lies. I didn’t have a single drink the entire time I was working on the script.”)

The film features an extraordinary cast, anchored by—and in part recruited by—Robert De Niro, who played Michael, the lead, and was among the first to sign on. “I liked the script, and [Cimino] had done a lot of prep,” says the actor. “I was impressed.” De Niro knew every actor in New York; he was the magnet who attracted established actors such as John Cazale—forever Fredo from the first two Godfathers—as well as up-and-comers such as Christopher Walken, who had grown up in musical theater and who played Nick, the Russian-roulette junkie; John Savage, who played Steven, the wedding scene’s groom; and Meryl Streep, whom Cimino had seen in a production of Kurt Weill’s Happy End on Broadway and practically hired on the spot as Linda, the love interest for Walken’s and De Niro’s characters. Offscreen, her boyfriend was Cazale, who was ill with cancer and would die shortly after The Deer Hunter finished shooting.

(While The Deer Hunter and Coming Home were both being put together, Streep did a brief scene opposite Fonda in Julia. Streep so impressed the veteran actress that she called Gilbert and said, “I’ve seen somebody who is going to be major. We should get her for Coming Home. Write this down: M-e-r-y-l … ” But Streep was already signed for another film—quite possibly The Deer Hunter, though no one recalls for certain.)

Just prior to the start of production, the director took the principal cast members to Weirton, West Virginia, which would in part fill in for Clairton. The cast hung out there for a week. Recalls Walken, “We went to a real Russian wedding, huge, with food and dancing. We traveled in the same car together, so by the time we did start shooting we had some real camaraderie going, which I hadn’t done in a movie before.”

De Niro, as is his custom, had done meticulous research for the project, speaking to a number of veterans. Cimino gave him a wallet with the actor’s picture and his character’s name on a driver’s license along with family photos that belonged to a real veteran. According to Walken, the director also gave the cast a photo of a dozen or so children which he said held great significance for him, although he declined to reveal what that was.

“Are You Doing Your Best?”

The Deer Hunter began principal photography on June 20, 1977. The Clairton scenes comprise footage shot in eight different towns in four states: West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Ohio. The celebrated wedding scene was filmed in Cleveland in a magnificent Russian Orthodox church, obscenely ornate, actually, given the poverty of the fictional surroundings. In the final film, this is a bravura sequence, running about half an hour. But at that point in the production, nearly halfway through principal photography, Cimino was already overbudget, and Spikings could tell from the script that shooting the extended scene could sink the project. He took Cimino for a walk and a heart-to-heart. The director said he’d shoot the scene economically and precisely. “I didn’t really buy it,” Spikings says. He told Cimino, “Michael, some people are saying that you are going a little crazy with this one. Are you doing your best?”

“Yes.”

Instead, Cimino shot take after take of dancing and partying (prefiguring his Heaven’s Gate indulgences). Says the cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, “Michael didn’t know what he was looking for, but he knew he was looking for something special.” Eventually he found it: at one point, out of sheer exhaustion, De Niro and Cazale fell on the floor, which made it into the final cut. “They were so tired,” says Zsigmond. ”That was obviously an accident, but that’s what he was looking for.” Spikings continues: “Michael lied about the way he would shoot the wedding, but he was right. This sequence is the heart of the film.”

The Vietnam sections were filmed in Thailand. “There was discussion about shooting the film on a back lot, but the material demanded more realism,” says Spikings. As a result of the dilatory wedding sequence, the picture had fallen even farther behind schedule. At the time, only a handful of Hollywood films had been shot in Thailand, so there was no reliable infrastructure for such an undertaking. The production was plagued with all kinds of logistical problems, and Spikings flew from London to get it under control.

Instead of spanking Cimino, Spikings became his champion: “Michael had come to the realization—he’s a very strong guy—that he was on a horse that was going to win everything. So he was determined to give it his very best, even if that meant that the budget might change. Because, by that time, we knew we were making something which might be important to America and to the world. And you just had to back that vision. You had to support him.”

Spikings’s Thai liaison was General Kriangsak Chomanan, the supreme commander of the Thai military. The producer simply called him “K.” Spikings recalls, “We needed lots of weapons, helicopters, armored personnel carriers—and he provided them all.” But one day Kriangsak told the producer, “What’s going to happen this weekend: we’re going to play some martial music, and we’re going to have a military coup. That means we need all the weapons back, the helicopters back, and all the armored personnel carriers back.”

“K! We’re making a movie here! You can’t do that! We’ve got an agreement—we’ve shaken hands!”

“Barry, Barry—please, please. You’re making a movie—I have a military coup. But it won’t take long. There’ll be a few people who’ll get shot on Sunday, and then you can have the stuff back.” (Kriangsak was in a position to know. He arranged a series of coups and became prime minister, ruling until 1980.)

Cimino strove for a documentary look in the Vietnam sequences. Some of the scenes were re-creations of film or photographs Carelli had found in her research, such as the famous sequence wherein De Niro and Savage are rescued from a rope bridge over the river Kwai—yes, that river Kwai!—by helicopter. Doing their own stunt work, the two actors could have lost their lives when the chopper snagged one of its skids in the bridge. As Savage remembers it, “The bridge was shaking, and everything was flying around, debris all over. I was frantic, screaming, ‘There’s something wrong, move it back.’ ” De Niro says he thought the helicopter was going to come down right on top of them. Instead, continues Savage, “the helicopter went straight up in the air, pulling the bridge upside down, and Bobby and I flipped over and were hanging next to each other underneath the helicopter, whose blades barely were missing the steel cable on either side of the bridge.”

Savage called out to De Niro, using his character’s name: “Michael, what do we do? Should we drop?”

“Will you get out of character?” De Niro yelled back. “What’re you doing? I don’t know—I don’t know if we should drop!”

The river was filled with spiky tree stumps, sunken boats, and huge rocks. “You go first!” Savage called out to De Niro.

“Nah, you go first.”

“Michael, should we drop?”

“Savage, for Christ’s sake, we’re not in character anymore! We’re not in the fucking movie!”

Seconds later, Savage says, “I dropped, he dropped, we hit the water, bumped into a sunken boat, and came up down the river, grateful to still be alive.”

“Ride Him, Goddammit, Ride Him!”

Coming Home had begun principal photography six months before The Deer Hunter, in January 1977, at a V.A. hospital in Southern California, where Voight and Fonda meet cute over a burst pissbag—those were the days!

Not surprisingly, the sex scene proved to be the shoot’s most difficult and freighted sequence. Despite its having been Fonda’s idea in the first place, as the time approached, she was anxious. “Jane had big concerns about doing the orgasm scene in its entirety,” Ashby told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. “She was afraid of the reaction of people who would say, ‘This is Jane Fonda, oh yeah, she makes it with all those weirdos.’ ” According to Gilbert, she was also worried about how her father would react. Says Fonda, “We wanted this scene to be really, really hot, a breakthrough, but—contrary to some people’s ideas of me—I’m really modest, so I wanted a body double” for most of the sequence.

Inquiring minds wanted to know how Luke could make love, and the filmmakers researched the question thoroughly, interviewing paraplegic vets and medical experts as well as the girlfriends and wives of paraplegics. The answer was that there was no single answer: a paraplegic’s ability to have an erection depends on the position and nature of his wound and is often unrelated to stimulation. For the film’s purposes, says Hellman, “it was decided that the thing that these guys could do was cunnilingus. They were great at it. And Jane’s character had never had it. She’d had a traditional guy, who jumps on and pumps away until he comes and gets off. But manliness wasn’t necessarily related to a big stiff dick. This big macho guy with the medals was a total wipeout as a husband and a lover. And the vet who had only half a body, he was the real man.” To help make that point, there’s a brief sequence early in the film where Fonda and Dern are having traditional missionary sex and the camera catches her staring vacantly off into space, while with Voight her character, Sally Hyde, enjoys what is presumably her first orgasm. (Later, after Dern discovers he’s been cuckolded, he confronts Voight and Fonda with a rifle. After a tense confrontation, Dern hands Voight the gun, and the film pauses for a close-up as Voight folds down the bayonet, driving the point home with all the subtlety of Andrea Dworkin’s phallophobic feminism.)

But one vet’s girlfriend had told Fonda, “I never know when he’s going to have an erection. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes we’ll be driving past a field of daisies and he’ll get an erection and it will last four hours.”

“That’s all Hal needed to hear,” Fonda says. “I don’t think I would have asked her had I known he was there. He wanted penetration. I wanted Luke’s penis not to work.” The notion of oral sex went out the window, at least as far as the director was concerned. When Fonda saw the rushes of the body double at work she was upset. “To my horror,” she continues, “it was real clear that the double was riding him,” that the couple was having intercourse. She realized that Ashby had won the first round of what she referred to as “the battle of penetration.” When it came time to shoot her portion of the scene, she spent a good part of the day in bed with Voight, naked beneath the sheets, while Ashby shot coverage. As Fonda describes it, “Jon whispered to me, ‘Jane, Hal’s yelling at you.’ So I tried to focus on what was being yelled. It was ‘Ride him, goddammit, ride him!’ I thought, No, I’m not gonna do it. I guess the only thing I can do is when I shoot my close-up I won’t move that way, so he won’t be able to cut into it. Which is what I did.” According to Fonda, Ashby stomped off the soundstage, furious at her. “Maybe he was just resistant to my wanting to make a point that good lovers don’t necessarily have to have erections,” she says, “which has become even more important to me now that I’m 70!”

At any rate, the final decision about the scene was going to be made in the editing room, where Ashby ruled. In the end, what was released was appropriately ambiguous: the nature of the sex is in the eye of the beholder, though most viewers and critics seemed to see it Fonda’s way. After the picture came out, she got a letter from a woman who told her, “What was revolutionary for me was that you were on top!”

But as Fonda had feared, the scene reverberated in her private life. According to Hellman, one day during postproduction he got a call from Henry Fonda, who said, “Look, I’ve just seen the movie, and I want to talk to you about recutting that scene. It’s really disgraceful.” Says Hellman, “Now, I knew Henry Fonda and his lovely wife, Shirlee. He was a lousy father and a very arrogant man, right? But Jane was intimidated by him. She wouldn’t confront him.” Jane Fonda doesn’t recall the incident herself, but Hellman says he told the elder Fonda, “There’s nothing to talk about. Hal has done a very good job.”

“Look, Hank. If you think there’s something wrong with that love scene, that’s your problem. It has nothing to do with our movie and I’m not going to touch it. Period.” Hellman concludes, “I never spoke to him again, and he never spoke to me again.”

Henry Fonda wasn’t the only one who had issues with Coming Home. When Hellman and Ashby showed it to U.A., the all-important head of marketing, Gabe Sumner, denounced the film as “anti-American” and asked, “Do you expect me to sell that?” By the time the picture was released, almost the entire executive cadre of U.A. had decamped en masse to form a new company, Orion. Their successors dumped the picture in theaters in February 1978, one of the worst months to release a movie with Oscar aspirations, and, according to Hellman, put no money behind it.

“We Got a Problem”

The Deer Hunter was having its own problems. Universal owned the domestic distribution rights. When Cimino and Spikings showed the film to parent company M.C.A.’s chairman, Lew Wasserman, and his lieutenant, Sid Sheinberg, they got a cool reception. It was, after all, a brutally violent three-hour movie about the Vietnam War with a love story that was fitful at best, and curdled at worst, in which one of the three main characters ends up dead, another is maimed, and the third is rendered practically catatonic. As Cimino told the Los Angeles Times in a 1978 interview, the studio was “concerned about everything. The subject, the violence, the length.” Adds Spikings, “I think they were shocked. What really upset them was ‘God Bless America.’ Sheinberg thought it was anti-American. He was vehement. He said something like ‘You’re poking a stick in the eye of America.’ They really didn’t like the movie. And they certainly didn’t like it at three hours two minutes.” Thom Mount, who was president of Universal at the time, says, “This was just a fucking continuing nightmare from the day Michael finished the picture to the day we released it. That was simply because he was wedded to everything he shot. The movie was endless. It was The Deer Hunter and the Hunter and the Hunter. The wedding sequence was a cinematic event all unto its own.” According to Spikings, Sheinberg said, “You’ve got to get one hour out of this movie—then we might think about releasing it.”

Mount says he turned to the formidable Verna Fields, who was then Universal’s head of postproduction and has been credited with “saving” Jaws in the editing room. “I sicced Verna on Cimino,” Mount says. “Verna was no slouch. She started to turn the heat up on Michael, and he started screeching and yelling.” Fields (or Cimino’s editor, Peter Zinner) cut 20 minutes out of the wedding scene. Both versions were previewed to midwestern audiences, and nearly everyone involved has a different recollection of how the screenings went, which cut of the movie played better. (In Cimino’s telling, he mechanically sabotaged the projection of the shorter cut.) In the end, according to Spikings, Wasserman let EMI’s C.E.O., Bernard Delfont, decide between the two. He chose the Cimino cut.

Universal planned to open the picture at one theater each in New York and Los Angeles for a week in December 1978, to qualify for Academy consideration, then close it to build interest. But just as the film was about to open, Cimino gave an interview to *The New York Times’*s Leticia Kent that nearly torpedoed the publicity campaign. The director told her, “I was attached to a Green Beret medical unit.” He said that he joined the army about the time of the Tet offensive, in 1968—making it sound as if he had sprung to the defense of his country—and trained in Texas, but was never sent to Vietnam. He gave his age as 35. As Mount recalls, “I was peacefully working in my office in California, and our publicist called me: ‘We got a problem.’

“ ‘Tell me exactly what he said.… He told the fucking New York Times he was a medic in the Green Berets? I know this guy. He was no more a medic in the Green Berets than I’m a rutabaga.’ So I went to see Mr. Wasserman. I said, ‘Lew, I think we have a huge problem. I think in 24 hours The New York Times is going to run an article about a delusional director. We have x millions of dollars in this fucking thing. I need the fiction that this guy is connected [to the military] or we’re fucked.’ Lew said, ‘I’ll call you back.’ The next day, early in the morning, Mr. Wasserman’s secretary calls and says, ‘Have the reporter call this number at the Pentagon.’ I passed it on through the publicist to the Times reporter.” Kent (who Vanity Fair was unable to locate) was presumably able to confirm Cimino’s claims to her satisfaction because the article ran with his assertions taken at face value.

In the April 1979 issue of Harper’s, however, Tom Buckley, who had been a Vietnam correspondent for The New York Times, would corroborate that Cimino had done a stint as a medic, but also discovered that the director had never been attached to the Green Berets, and that his active service—six months—occurred in 1962, when he signed up for the army reserve, not immediately subsequent to the Tet offensive. Cimino denied having lied about his military record, and his publicist reportedly said that he intended to sue Buckley. He never did.

Even his closest collaborators weren’t sure where the truth lay. Cimino had given Vilmos Zsigmond the impression that the characters and events in the film were somehow related to the director’s own experience. Says Zsigmond, “It seemed to me that he was involved with the war, that many, many of the stories in the film are biographical. But I don’t know where and how. He never really was specific about it.” Even Carelli, his close associate, has no idea what the truth is about Cimino’s military service. “It’s hard to tell with Michael. I don’t know where this comes from.”

Says Washburn, “Mike is or was a pathological liar. He lied to everybody—about everything. I don’t think he ever knew where [the truth] was. A compulsive liar doesn’t know he’s lying.” But, adds Washburn, “The movie never would have gotten made had he not been.”

Spikings is more diplomatic. “No, no, no,” he says. “He’s a storyteller. Hemingway told stories about fighting bulls, John Huston told stories about tangling with elephants. He never shot an elephant in his life. They’re storytellers.”

“Popular Epic” or “Massively Vague”?

When Coming Home opened, in February 1978, the reviews were respectful, but by no means outstanding. Frank Rich, in Time magazine, called it “a devastating vision of this country’s recent social history.… Coming Home is, as its material dictates, one long, low howl of pain.” Roger Ebert called it “an extraordinarily moving film,” in the Chicago Sun-Times. On the other hand, Vincent Canby, in The New York Times, dismissed it as “soggy with good if unrealized intentions.” The film didn’t pick up much steam at the box office until it was showered with Oscar nominations almost a year after it was released. But the vets loved it, and Hellman was invited to Washington with the film by Max Cleland, Jimmy Carter’s head of the Veterans Administration, who had himself lost three limbs in Vietnam. He showed it to members of Congress, and the film became an important tool for advocates for the disabled.

Ten months after Coming Home debuted, the innovative plan to open The Deer Hunter for a single week in December worked perfectly, creating frantic want-to-see. It helped that the reviews were generally breathless. In Newsweek, Jack Kroll wrote that the movie placed Cimino “right at the center of our film culture.” In The New York Times, Vincent Canby called The Deer Hunter “a big, awkward, crazily ambitious, sometimes breathtaking motion picture that comes as close to being a popular epic as any movie about this country since ‘The Godfather’ … its vision is that of an original, major new filmmaker.”

But there were negative voices too. Andrew Sarris called the film “massively vague, tediously elliptical, and mysteriously hysterical.… It is perhaps significant that the actors remain more interesting than the characters they play.” The Russian-roulette motif, the portrayal of the North Vietnamese, and the picture’s attitude toward the war invited a barrage of criticism. As Pauline Kael wrote, “The Vietcong are treated in the standard inscrutable-evil Oriental style of the Japanese in the Second World War movies.… The impression a viewer gets is that if we did some bad things there we did them ruthlessly but impersonally; the Vietcong were cruel and sadistic.” Another point of contention was the final scene, where the characters sing “God Bless America”—was it meant ironically or not, as a critique of patriotism or a paean to it?

Unsurprisingly, the picture ignited a particularly vicious round of the art-versus-truth debate, pitting reviewers who generally indulged it against former war correspondents who came out of the woodwork to denounce the picture’s liberties with the historical record. Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the war, wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “In its 20 years of war, there was not a single recorded case of Russian roulette.… The central metaphor of the movie is simply a bloody lie.” Under the headline the gook-hunter, The New York Times ran an op-ed piece by John Pilger, who had also covered the war for the paper. “Hollywood sensed that a lot of money could be made with a movie that appealed directly to those racial instincts that cause wars and that allowed the Vietnam war to endure for so long.… ‘The Deer Hunter’ and its apologists insult the memory of every American who died in Vietnam.”

Cimino’s own remarks did little to clarify his intentions. He has always been a moving target. Years later, in 2002, he playfully told Vanity Fair, “When I’m kidding, I’m serious, and when I’m serious, I’m kidding. I am not who I am, and I am who I am not.” In his interview with Kent, he gave himself a free hand to portray anything he wanted, regardless of its historical authenticity, arguing that in Vietnam “anything you could imagine happening probably happened.” When Cimino was asked by a reporter how he felt about audiences cheering when the movie’s soldiers killed their N.V.A. captors, he replied, “I think it testifies to the fact that there’s a lot of pride in this country.… We’ve been defensive too long about feeling positive about this country.” On the other hand, he told Variety that The Deer Hunter is “an antiwar film, but not a political film.” And, watering it down again, he told Time magazine that his characters “are trying to support each other. They are not endorsing anything except their common humanity.”

Both films performed well at the box office. Coming Home, which ultimately cost about $7.2 million, grossed $32.7 million in the U.S. The Deer Hunter cost a little over twice that much, about $15 million, and earned almost $49 million. These numbers were not spectacular (Grease led with $160 million for films released in 1978, and Superman followed with $134 million), but considering the subject matter, they were respectable.

Looking backward from the distance of three decades, one thing that comes as a surprise is the extent to which the two pictures resemble each other. Both feel like works in progress, with dialogue made up as the actors went along. Both films take the measure of the war’s impact on the men who fought it. Walken’s Nick is unable to leave Vietnam for home, and kills himself there. Dern’s officer commits suicide at home, plunging into the Pacific naked, but in Gilbert’s view, he’s trying to swim back to Vietnam. Both films end on notes of exhaustion, confusion, and dysfunction. Both films feature V.A. hospitals and maimed vets. John Savage, who plays the legless G.I. in The Deer Hunter, says people were forever mistaking him for Jon Voight. The politics expressed by Voight’s Luke Martin, in a climactic scene where he addresses an audience of high-school kids, is almost indistinguishable from the message delivered by The Deer Hunter: both films condemn the war for damaging white American males.

Nevertheless, there are significant differences. In The New York Times not long ago, A. O. Scott aptly contrasted “the wounded liberalism of Coming Home” with “the wounded conservatism of The Deer Hunter.” Voight’s character not only laments the harm the war did to G.I.’s, but goes a tad further, slagging the military for making white American males do things that they felt bad about—namely, killing Vietnamese. And he complains that war in general is not as exciting as it’s cracked up to be in John Wayne movies. The Deer Hunter, on the other hand, has few scruples about killing Vietnamese; the sadistic, cackling monkeys with dollar bills clutched in their paws deserve what they get. What the film doesn’t like is Vietnamese killing white American males and exposing them to emotional and physical trauma like Russian roulette. Coming Home is considerably more upbeat than The Deer Hunter. It was shot in sunny Southern California, and it reflects that. The peace movement, to which Luke Martin and Fonda’s Sally Hyde are reluctant converts, energizes them, gives them purpose and direction, especially Luke, who chains himself to the gates of a Marine recruiting center. The characters of The Deer Hunter, on the other hand, shadowed by the sunless, slate-gray skies of Pennsylvania coal country, are just shattered. And then, of course, Coming Home also presents a critique of “patriarchy,” as Fonda puts it, while The Deer Hunter stumbles around in a morass of homoeroticism and misogyny which it evokes but refuses to explore.

Passions surrounding the two films ran high. Dern, who was friendly with Cimino, also knew Bert Schneider, the producer of Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces as well as the anti-war Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds, which had won an Oscar in 1974. Schneider had created an uproar when, during his acceptance speech, he delivered a message from the Vietcong. Cimino had asked Dern to invite him to a screening of The Deer Hunter—a big mistake.

“The last conversation I ever had with Bert in my life was the rudest I’ve ever been treated in the 40 years I’ve been in the business,” Dern recalls. “After the screening Bert raced across that fucking parking lot to get in my face. He said to me, ‘This is a sacrilegious piece of shit! This is disgusting, it’s a lie, it’s untrue, it never happened, it’s glorifying war, glorifying everything that America stands for that sucks.’ I said, ‘Bert, I don’t have anything to do with this movie. I’m not in the fucking movie. Don’t yell at me.’ A guy verbally beats me half to death because I have a friend who made fucking Deer Hunter?”

Dern got off easy. According to producer Barry Spikings, Frances FitzGerald, who had written one of the best books on the war, Fire in the Lake, punched him at a house party, saying, “How dare you? How dare you?”

“Our Film Was Better”

It was an exciting Oscar race that year. The smart money was on Warren Beatty and his hit comedy, Heaven Can Wait, which matched The Deer Hunter with nine nominations, followed by *Coming Home’*s eight. All three were up for best picture, and everyone was sure that The Deer Hunter and Coming Home would cancel each other out. Besides, Beatty was an insider and well liked, while Fonda was still Hanoi Jane to a substantial number of Academy voters, Ashby was a hippie recluse, and Cimino was a nobody from New York. The other contenders for best picture, An Unmarried Woman and Midnight Express, were little better than afterthoughts.

As the golden night approached, the backlash against The Deer Hunter gathered strength. When the limos pulled up to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on April 9, 1979, they were met by demonstrators, mostly from the Los Angeles chapter of Vietnam Vets Against the War, waving placards covered with slogans that read, no oscars for racism and the deer hunter a bloody lie. Washburn, up for best original screenplay, claims his limousine was pelted with stones. According to Variety, “Police and The Deer Hunter protesters clashed in a brief but bloody battle that resulted in 13 arrests.”

Those were the days when anyone who was cool didn’t bother to attend the ceremony. Ashby was a no-show, ditto De Niro, but almost everyone else from both pictures was there. Coming Home was the first of the contenders to show muscle in the major categories: Waldo Salt, Bob Jones, and Nancy Dowd won the Oscar for best original screenplay. It was widely reported that they had never met one another before (actually they had, at a Writers Guild award ceremony a few weeks earlier), highlighting the peculiarities of the writing process in Hollywood. The Deer Hunter had won two technical awards, and Walken picked up best supporting actor, but when Fonda and Voight won the best-acting Oscars (the latter beating De Niro), for a moment it looked as if U.A. might snag its fourth best-picture Oscar in a row.

Then Cimino won best director. It must have been an uncomfortable moment for presenter Francis Coppola, whose own Vietnam epic, Apocalypse Now, wouldn’t come out until the following year, to have to bestow the award upon his rival. When John Wayne walked out on the stage to present best picture, he looked like a ghost. Ravaged by cancer, he would die two months later. After he opened the envelope and named Cimino, Spikings, and the other producers of The Deer Hunter, “the acclaim was respectful but well short of thunderous,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

The best-picture loss rankled the Coming Home gang. Cimino had done everything that they had meticulously avoided in the name of respecting the Vietnamese—including shooting combat scenes in which the Vietnamese were played by Thais—and had not only gotten away with it but been rewarded. For Fonda and her comrades, it was a slap in the face to a decade’s worth of activism, to everything they had believed and fought for. According to an interview Cimino gave People at the time, he ran into Fonda in the elevator on his way to the backstage press conference. He extended his hand to congratulate her, but she wouldn’t take it. “She wouldn’t look at me,” he said. “She wouldn’t talk to me. It was very embarrassing. She was that far away.” In subsequent interviews, Fonda labeled The Deer Hunter “racist” and added, “Our film was better.” But, as Gilbert acknowledges, “she made a big mistake. She hadn’t seen the film, and so it undercut her credibility, even though everything she said was right.” Fonda says she hasn’t seen The Deer Hunter to this day.

In truth, the proverbial test of time has been kind to both films. Coming Home is not perfect, but has some spectacular moments. The all too brief opening scenes in the V.A. hospital, in which a group of non-actor vets improvised their lines, are electrifying, while the movie-movie shortcomings of the remainder of the picture—mechanical use of period songs, a tried-and-true saga of radicalization unfolding in Southern California (where else does a paraplegic vet who looks like Jon Voight in his prime win Jane Fonda and drive around in a classic Porsche Speedster?), and a clumsy third act—are more than redeemed by fine acting, terse editing, and a surprisingly serviceable script, given the way it was cobbled together. Ashby went on to make one more outstanding film, Being There, the following year, and then spiraled downward until his death in 1988.

As for The Deer Hunter, what is to be said? Life would be a lot easier if art and politics walked hand in hand, but they rarely do. As unforgivable as the picture’s racism and historical revisionism are, it cannot be denied that it is a movie of profound power, especially if you can stay awake through its interminable running time. Zsigmond outdid himself in capturing the visual drama of the blast furnaces—bulky figures silhouetted against rivers of molten orange metal snaking through the cavernous, blue-gray smoky interiors of the mill—not to mention the grittiness of the Vietnam sequences and the ethereal otherworldliness of the mist-shrouded hunting scenes. But even better than that, and for this Cimino deserves the credit, are the lengthy shots where the camera stays back, allowing the actors to play with and against one another as they walk, run, stumble, and improvise their way from A to B—where another director would have just cut. It’s these shots, which sometimes run the length of an entire scene, that allow the ensemble cast to really come alive and give the picture its extraordinary vitality.

The political agenda of The Deer Hunter remains something of a mystery. It may have been more a by-product of Hollywood myopia, the demands of the war-film genre, garden-variety American parochialism, and simple ignorance than it was the pre-meditated right-wing road map it seemed to many. Even the incendiary Russian-roulette routine was a leftover from a discarded script that had nothing to do with the war. According to Walken, the historical context was never paramount. He says, “In the making of it, I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning Vietnam!” On the other hand, Cimino has publicly referred to Fonda as “Hanoi Jane,” so he may have had more on his mind than he cared to admit. The principals remain proud of the film and most shrug off political questions. Says De Niro, “Whether [*The Deer Hunter’*s vision of the war] actually happened or not, it’s something you could imagine very easily happening. Maybe it did. I don’t know. All’s fair in love and war.”

Vietnam remains an open wound, and even with the U.S. fighting two new wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan—and Hollywood in the midst of another film cycle devoted to those conflicts—Coming Home and The Deer Hunter retain the power to provoke and divide. In some ways, they are more relevant than ever. Says Fonda, “I hadn’t seen Coming Home on a big screen for 30 years until recently, and I was just sobbing, out of grief that we haven’t learned the lessons of Vietnam. We’re still sending guys to war based on a lie.”

On the other hand, Voight, who has made a political 180-degree turn since the 1970s, initially didn’t even want to discuss Coming Home, because it can be used as an argument in favor of the U.S. getting out of Iraq, a war he supports. “As I look back, I question everything,” he says. “I had great regrets when I saw what happened in the aftermath of our pulling out of Vietnam.… It left a terrible bloodbath.” He adds, “Today, I wouldn’t do that movie. I would do a movie about the American soldiers as liberators, because that’s what they are now.”

Ironically, Voight is bookended by Spikings, who, although he too is still proud of The Deer Hunter, which he considers an anti-war movie, also has misgivings. “I don’t think any of us meant it to be exploitive,” he says. “But I think we were … ignorant. I can’t think of a better word for it. I didn’t realize how badly we’d behaved to the Vietnamese people until two events in my life.” One was when FitzGerald slugged him. “That set me thinking about the things we’d been”—he pauses—“a bit remiss about in the movie.” Then, years later, he made a trip to Vietnam with the director Phillip Noyce while working on another project. “We visited the War Crimes Museum, in Hanoi. As we arrived, we encountered a group of women from the countryside. Two or three of them spoke English. They were pleased to see us there, bearing witness to our sins. We walked around, chattering away. The last exhibit in the museum consists of giant black-and-white photographs of kids affected by Agent Orange—kids with one eye in the middle of the head, that sort of thing—and, suddenly, the entire atmosphere changed. I said, ‘Phil, we should leave now. Because these women are going to throw rocks at us. They’re going to kill us.’ We fled.

“There was a lot wrong with The Deer Hunter,” Spikings continues. “Would I make a different movie today? Hopefully. It would be more careful about the Vietnamese people. We defamed them. And I regret that.”